A modest rejoinder

A modest rejoinder

A modest rejoinder

Josh Cohen’s review of my last two books misrepresents my position so thoroughly that I think a short clarification is required. I prefer to disregard his resumé of my reading of Hegel which begins with a total nonsense: “Where, in the standard reading of Hegel, one element comes into conflict with another external to it, in Žižek’s reading, conflict is internal or ‘immanent’ to the first element.” It is precisely in the standard reading of Hegel that conflict is internal to the first element, while in my reading, the “first element” is a retroactive illusion, it “becomes first” in the course of the dialectical process. There is no place here to dwell on the central topic of my reading of Hegel which is absent from Cohen’s resumé (how to move beyond transcendental approach without falling back into pre-critical realism), or on how Cohen totally misses the point of my deployment of the antagonism internal to the void itself. More interesting for most of the readers is Cohen’s total misrepresentation of my political stance. He attributes to me a grim vision in which today’s late capitalism appears as the worst of all possible worlds, worse than Nazism or Stalinism:

The grim prospect of ’non-eventful survival in a hedonist-utilitarian universe’ licenses Žižek to prefer even the most catastrophic political experiment to our current set-up. As he writes: ‘Better the worst of Stalinism than the best of the liberal-capitalist welfare state.’”

In view of later developments, Cohen would undoubtedly attribute to me the claim: “Better the worst of Isis than the best of liberal democracy…” Yes, I did write the statement he quotes a couple of times, but I always strongly qualified it, like here: “Better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy. Of course, the moment one compares the positive content of the two, the Welfare State capitalist democracy is incomparably better.”

[Extract. Appeared in New Statesman, on March 27th, 2015. (full text).]